CRASS
wasn’t particularly wise or even realistic, but just occasionally it worked. I think the Conway Hall gig was a point at which it might have worked.” Joy De Vivre:“Of course there’s an honourable tradition of beating up the fascists, but how did they become fascists? There’s such a load of full stops everywhere and I guess a lot of our stuff was just trying to erase the full stops and start people seeing each other.” On the subject of skinheads, Penny Rimbaud credits himself with having started the movement back in the sixties: “When I was at art school, I found this barber. He’d learnt his hairdressing in the Polish Army, where he shaved a lot of heads. I decided I’d have my head shaved. Then I got a bluebeat hat, which was my dad’s trilby cut down.We had an American student staying with us who had a pair of desert boots which he gave to me. Then the building department boys at college – who were the hard nuts – really fancied the gear, so they started wearing it. I definitely think I was one of the prototype skinheads.” The Conway Hall gig also boosted one of the more extreme fanzines of the day. Toxic Graffity (sic) had been lined up as the benefactor of the next gig Crass was to play at the Conway Hall, but since they were now understandably persona-non-grata, they offered instead to give the fanzine a new track ‘Rival Tribal Rebel Revels’ – partly inspired by the Conway Hall events – for inclusion as a flexi-disc for the next issue.This proved such a popular move that Toxic Graffity sold tens of thousands, where purchasers were treated to page after page of anarchist ranting and newspaper cut-out invective. It was possibly a sign of one of the failings of the movement that the intelligent and eloquent young man who put the fanzine together considered constant dumbing-down and clichés as the best way to get his message over. “The extreme left is largely made up from educated and privileged people who, because of their social background, are able to infiltrate organisations, from schools to the media, in which they can push their propaganda.The threat that they pose to the development of radical creative change is far greater than that of right-wing organisations.The right, because it lacks any true political ideology (at least, that which it does have is so laughably transparent) and because it rarely has the ‘social respectability’ of the left, relies on its appeal to a small group of people who,
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